March is Fraud Prevention Month

I don't make enough money from this blog so I do some work for the government on the side. I mean, technically it's full-time but it's pretty laid back there so I have lots of time to work on other stuff when I'm stuck at the office. (Bleech!)

Recently I finished the poster for Fraud Prevention Month (above). We drew heavily from a collage of clinical depression stock photos my colleague found on tumblr. Before we knew it the deadline was fast approaching so rather than stage our own shots, we just went to the Xanax website and grabbed a bunch of ‘before’ photos except for the one in the bottom right which we found on a post-partum depression website. With the photos in place we just needed to put the copy on, add some meaningless shapes at the top and we were home free. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

March is a good month for fraud prevention because March only has these other 14 causes already associated with it in Canada:

• National Nutrition Month
• Help Fight Liver Disease Month
• Juvenile Arthritis Awareness Month
• National Brain Injury Awareness Month
• National Kidney Awareness Month
• National Social Workers Month
• National Epilepsy Month
• National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month
• Red Cross Month
• National Engineering Month
• Youth Science Month
• Easter Seals Month
• National Music Therapy Month
• Deep-Vein Thrombosis Awareness Month

Priorities are important so we make a lot of them!

The point of Fraud Prevention Month is to remind people to be vigilant. The federal government wants to make a big push next year to prevent fraud in March. Just don’t tell any criminals March is the month we are preventing fraud because then they will lay off that month and only target Canadians the other 11 months of the year. That reminds me, we used 11 stock photos in the poster so that there would be one for each month of the year that isn’t for preventing fraud, yay!

We thought about using the campaign to let people know how common frauds are perpetrated but we quickly realized that would be too much work and we didn't want to overwhelm our audience. There are already 16 words on the poster. 25 if you include the Canada logo at the bottom! It may not convey any useful information but it looks stark and grave and no one is smiling so I’m pretty sure it will raise “awareness” that fraud is bad, which is something Canadians might not have known before. "Awareness" is an important intangible that we talk a lot about at work. We cannot (or is it do not?) measure it, which is nice because we don't have to worry about getting feedback on how we are doing. Feedback is the worst.

Besides, once you raise awareness of something then you automatically prevent it. There's no middle step. No, “awareness” and “prevention” go hand-in-hand like “sad-picture-of-a-woman-sniffing-a-mug” goes with “fraud".

At work we always talk about how we will make our poster campaign connect with the casual Canadian on the street. One thing we like to do is ask the reader a question to make it personal. For example in this poster we asked, "Are you a target?" We were careful not to provide any helpful information that might answer the question because we knew it would distract from the message that fraud is bad. Another way to connect with Canadians is to make half the people on your poster black because black people make up 2.5% of the population. Not to mention the fact that fraud affects black people at a much higher rate than the general population. Or is that sickle cell anemia? I can never remember.

Without these posters you might not know that you are supposed to recognize fraud. Not that the poster gives you any actual information that might help you recognize it. No because a few bullets labeling common scams might have forced us to lose the picture of the woman holding a baby which would have been a dreadful mistake since babies are very susceptible to being victimized by fraudsters, or so I've heard. Someone at the office mooted the possibility of putting the URL for this RCMP website on the poster but that notion was quickly shot down by the powers that be because "we work for the Competition Bureau, not the RCMP." Makes sense.

We wanted to do more than tell Canadians they should recognize fraud, we also wanted to let them know they should report fraud and that they should stop it. We understood it wouldn't be feasible to try and explain how to "REPORT IT" or how to "STOP IT". A sentence with more than two words would only serve to confuse Canadians who all read at a kindergarten level. We couldn't put the the Crime Stoppers number on the poster either because that number is 10 digits long. It would have been pandemonium on the streets if that big a number was placed in that big blank space at the bottom.

At one point we thought about doing a general “report crime” campaign but luckily we came to our senses and realized that would be too broad. We plan to do a “REPORT IT” campaign for each genre of crime instead. One step at a time, right?

Now that Canadians know they are supposed to report fraud, all they need to do is look up the Service Canada number online, call it, navigate their way through the automated answering service to the queue to speak to a real person, wait in the queue for a long time because of the cuts to Service Canada, get redirected to the government department that accepts fraud reports -- I’m sure the general helpline will know exactly where fraud calls go, btw -- and wait just another half hour before reporting to a jaded customer service rep whose first language is French.

The Competition Bureau emphasized to us that the Canada logo had to be real big so that Canadians would know what country they are in and not be confused into thinking that they should report fraud in other places too. They wanted us to make the lettering for the Competition Bureau real small, though, so that old people wouldn't be able to read it. The last thing you want is old people calling you. Look at the one in the poster! Old people don't know what phones is!

Everyone at the office agreed this poster is the perfect complement to our new plastic money that has advanced counterfeiting technologies. One new guy at the office suggested using this poster to explain to the public how to use those technologies to verify their money isn't fraudulent but that would obviously distract from our message which is: “Fraud. Prevent it. Or be sad.” Until we can convince Canadians that fraud should be prevented and not encouraged, it would be a mistake to get ahead of ourselves. We probably won’t succeed until we get that last part down to two words. Maybe the third line could be, “Or sadness”? I don’t know. We’ll workshop it at the next committee meeting.

Besides, everyone knows that the new plastic money melts so they can test the legitimacy of cash money quite easily: if it lights on fire then it is fake, if it melts apart then it is real and you can exchange the leftover glob of currency for fresh bills later. No business deal is going to be negatively affected if one party tries to light the money on fire during the middle of it, that's for sure.

It's a great feeling of accomplishment to have another quality product under out belts. Our posters have been sent out to every police station across the country. They are probably already being put up next to the coffee machine in the police station basement as I type this. And once police officers understand that fraud is something that should be prevented in March it’s only a matter of time before the whole world knows.